Celebrated Silent Hill designer Masahiro Ito has a card illustration in the next Magic: The Gathering set, Duskmourn. Revealed on Saturday in the set’s PAX debut, the card featuring the artist’s work is a reprint of the powerful black board wipe Damnation.
Best known for his work as creature designer on the first three Silent Hill games, and art director on Silent Hill 2 and 3, Ito seems like the perfect special guest artist to contribute work to the horror MTG set Duskmourn. His monster designs, like the famous Pyramid Head, have gone down in history as some of the best in gaming.
So it’s sort of a shame, I think, that Wizards of the Coast didn’t get Ito to create his own creature for this card. Instead, this version of Damnation features Duskmourn’s main villain, Valgavoth. We must admire the unique approach taken to encapsulating the creature, however. For what is essentially a giant moth, the artist has managed to make the demon look really fleshy and horrible.
While not printed in the main set, Damnation is one of Duskmourn’s ‘Special Guest’ cards. This means it’s part of a selection of reprints that have been chosen for their thematic relevance to the set, given new art, and added to the release. It’s sort of a more refined version of The List, and indeed the Special Guest list seems to have replaced The List altogether as of Bloomburrow.
Duskmourn draws its horrifying creatures and scenery from a wide range of sources, and contains plenty of homages, but there’s definitely a good bit of Silent Hill in there. In particular, the monsters that are created from survivor’s fears puts us in mind of the classic horror game series.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out the MTG release schedule. And if you’ve not been following Duskmourn so far, here are the set’s face commanders and its planeswalker card.
Source: Wargamer
